Susan Choi Recommends a Book So Engrossing It Made Her (Almost) Lose Her Luggage

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com's books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you're on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you're here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
What began as a short story in The New Yorker is now Susan Choi's sixth and latest novel, Flashlight, about a man who goes missing—and the resulting trauma for his family. Like the family in the book, Choi lived in Japan for a short period during her childhood. (Nor is this the first time she's shared autobiographical details with her characters: Her father was a math professor, like a character in 2003's A Person of Interest; she went to graduate school, the setting of 2013's My Education; and she attended a theater program in high school, as do the protagonists in 2019's National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise, for which she wrote at least 3 different endings.) Her second novel, 2004's American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and adapted into a film, and she has also written a children's book, Camp Tiger. Choi teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, yet one literary goal remains elusive: 'Trying to read 50 books a year,' she says. 'I've never achieved the goal and some years I don't even come close, but I love trying.'
The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, New York-based bestselling author studied literature at Yale University; was once fired from a literary agency for being too much of a 'literary snob'; was a fact-checker at The New Yorker and co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker with editor David Remnick; won an ASME Award for Fiction for 'The Whale Mother' in Harper's Magazine; and has two sons.
Likes: theater; fabric stores; kintsugi; the Fort Greene Park Greenmarket; savory buns; flowers.
Dislikes: being on stage; low-hovering helicopters.
Good at: rocking her gray hair.
Bad at: cleaning menorahs; coming up with book titles.
Scroll through the reads she recommends below.
It's not exactly a missed-the-train moment, but I was re-reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov while waiting on a train platform [once], and when the train pulled in I stood up, still reading, boarded the train, still reading, and sat down, still reading…until at some point, after the train pulled away, I realized that I had left my luggage on the platform.
Philip Roth's Everyman. I never would have thought a novel about the bodily decline and eventual death of a hyper-masculine Jewish guy who mistreats many of the women in his life—a lot like Philip Roth—could make me literally heave-sob at the end. But this is why Roth is such an incredible writer: He makes us feel enormous compassion for people we don't even like.
Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, which kaleidoscopically compresses the stormy history of 20th-century Germany into barely a hundred pages, while holding the focus steady on a single plot of land. It's one of those books that makes you want to write.
All of Proust. Or even just some decent amount of Proust. I love the prose but also find it so exquisite it's almost unbearable to continue reading for any length of time, at least for me, which makes me feel like a total failure as a reader. I might have to set aside a year of my life just to read Proust.
Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall is impossible to put down, and it's also so tensely coiled from the very beginning that reading it I sometimes forgot to breathe! In some ways it's a 'small' story—about a girl and her parents doing a crazy-seeming reenactment of prehistoric life in the English countryside—but then it turns out to be about the biggest things, like what it means to be a people, or a nation, or even human.
Rachel Khong's Real Americans, which I am so riveted by that as soon as I finish these questions, I'm picking it back up. It's a story about three people who, despite how deeply they feel for each other—and how deeply we feel for them—cannot manage to be a family. My heart is already half-broken and I'm only halfway through it.
Paul Beatty's The Sellout. I was sitting on the beach in Maui (the one time I have ever been to Maui), reading that book instead of swimming, and a stranger came up to me to ask what it was because apparently I was laughing so hard I'd attracted general attention.
In Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, two young guerilla fighters, boy and girl, fall madly in love and start having trysts in the back of an ambulance. The girl also has a pet squirrel that she's been carrying around in her bra, and, during the trysts, the squirrel runs frantically around the back of the ambulance. These are some of the funniest, wildest, most heartfelt sex scenes ever put on paper.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read it every few years because it feels new every time and, at the same time, it feels so familiar, like returning to a favorite place. I love every single sentence in it, even the sentences that are totally over-the-top (and there are a lot of them!) because they remind me that Fitzgerald was actually a fallible human being, capable of writing very over-the-top sentences sometimes.
Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God shocked me the first time I read it because it really felt like the book was looking at me, like it knew exactly who I was. The protagonist has, like me, a real culture-clash background, and up to the point in my life when I read the book—the '90s—I'd never encountered that in fiction, so it was very emotional when I finally did.
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. Just read it. You'll thank me.
Renee Gladman is one of my absolute favorite living writers/artists, yet I was totally unaware of her until maybe six years ago when I was recommended her work by an employee—I am so sorry I don't know his name—at my local indie bookstore. Now it feels unimaginable to me that I ever lived my life without Renee Gladman!
Everything by Ali Smith, and Ali Smith herself. She is such a brilliant, compassionate, elating observer of us humans and the strange things we do.
The London Library. A friend who's a member showed it to me a few years ago, and I never wanted to leave. Maybe they'll set up a hammock for me!
PEN America, because they support freedom of expression, which none of us can take for granted anymore.$14.40 at amazon.com$14.00 at amazon.com$5.36 at amazon.com$10.99 at amazon.com$13.60 at amazon.com$25.00 at amazon.com$15.00 at amazon.com$6.99 at amazon.com$10.29 at amazon.com$16.74 at amazon.com
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